I've been covering the transportation industry for 20 years. Past publications include The Charlotte Observer, Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee. I also worked for U.S. Airways, writing internal publications and speeches for the company's executives. I'm a graduate of Wesleyan University and have a master's in journalism from Columbia University. Unlike most bloggers, I don't hate airlines.

Congress Wouldn't Fix Airport Customs Lines, So Vancouver Airport Did

Passport kiosks have become a bright spot in commercial aviation. Their story is one of how airlines, Customs and Border Protection and an innovative Canadian airport worked together to bypass the dysfunctional U.S. Congress to solve a long-standing problem.

The problem, long lines awaiting airport Customs inspection in order to enter the U.S., has plagued gateway airports for decades. Congress never seemed willing to provide sufficient funding to hire enough agents to adequately staff the Customs facilities, even as international travel grew – and even though airport arrivals provide many passengers with their first impression of the United States.

You would think that would seem important. But to Congress, CBP funding always meant one more chance to stage a partisan battle over immigration and staffing at the Mexican border. So nothing got done.

Enter the Vancouver Airport Authority. Of Vancouver Airport’s 18 million 2013 passengers, nearly half were international passengers including U.S. passengers. Vancouver, LAX and San Francisco International Airport are the three primary West Coast gateways to Asia.

Vancouver also has a CBP station to process the large number of arriving U.S. passengers. With that came the long lines. But YVR decided to do something about them, and it has become the primary developer of passport kiosks, which are now being rolled out en masse in U.S. airports.

“We had long lines here, the same problem (as U.S. airports),” said Craig Richmond, CEO of the Vancouver Airport Authority, a non-profit company that manages the airport under a lease with the government. “We had built huge (international arrivals) areas with lots of stations, but you never got the funding to fill them (with CBP agents).”

The airport authority also had experience with airport kiosks: starting in 1996, Vancouver was among the first North American airports to have common use check-in kiosks. Four years ago, the airport began to develop passport kiosks. The technology challenges, Richmond said, included understanding the U.S. customs process, so that the computer could accept information and send it to CBP in the right format, and developing coding to do that.

“We’re a private company,” Richmond said. “We can move very quickly: we can write code and test it very quickly. And we worked very closely with the CBP folks. They were with us every step of the way and I would say they are amongst our biggest sales force: they really like the product and sing its praises.”

In May 2013, passport computers were installed at Vancouver International, cutting wait times by 50%. Since then, Vancouver’s airport authority has sold about 300 passport kiosks to airports and airlines. Richmond wouldn’t specify the cost, but Charlotte Douglas International Airport paid $2 million for 24 kiosks, which works out to about $83,000 each. Charlotte’s kiosks were installed last month.

Vancouver has about a half dozen competitors in the airport kiosk business including Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, which also developed its own system and plans to market to other airports. Vancouver has about 80% of the kiosk market with installations at 13 airports: its 11 U.S. airports include Atlanta, Chicago O’Hare, JFK and Seattle. This month, its kiosks open in Detroit, LAX Terminal 5 and Newark.

The European company SITA had developed the kiosks at Miami International Airport, the second leading U.S. gateway.

Among airlines, Delta has moved the quickest to ensure kiosks at its hubs. It is paying for 190 kiosks to be installed by this summer. Included are 52 at JFK, 74 at Atlanta, 30 at Detroit, 14 at Seattle 10 at LAX and 10 at Minneapolis. United has paid for the soon-to-be-ready kiosks in Newark. Conceivably it will also pay at San Francisco, which will install kiosks next spring.

American, meanwhile, has backed the installation of kiosks at its hubs in Charlotte and Dallas where, eventually, it ends up paying most of the cost. Additionally, American “works with airports to provide scheduling information so they can determine demand and the size of the kiosk operation that will be needed” said spokeswoman Martha Thomas.

So this story has a happy ending, as millions of Americans now benefit from shorter waits. Too bad they all had to wait long enough for new technology to enable the stakeholders to work around our roadblock Congress.

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